


Same Old Skies of Gray

by imachar



Series: Just Give Me One Good Year [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Divorce, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-07
Updated: 2012-09-07
Packaged: 2017-11-13 18:39:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/506499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imachar/pseuds/imachar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So just how awful was that Christmas in Dorset after Sherlock dropped his bombshell – Lestrade and his oldest have a conversation about divorce.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Same Old Skies of Gray

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd as always by the wonderful **zauzat**
> 
> This piece serves as a prologue to what will eventually be a four part John/Lestrade series that stretches from ASiB to the aftermath of TRF

“Hi Dad, Gran thought you might like some tea.”

The creak of the shed door as it swings back on its hinges and the sudden blast of cold air eddying in the loamy warmth of the old shed make Greg Lestrade flinch in surprise and he has to bite back the urge to snap at the unexpected interruption. He really doesn’t want to talk to anybody at the moment, not even his much beloved oldest child. For the last forty-eight hours he’s been fighting an almost overwhelming sense of despondent futility – humiliation warring with disbelief and occasional moments of genuine misery – having to hide all of it in front of the in-laws and the kids until he’s finally taken refuge in the quiet solitude of his father-in-law’s garden shed. He’s desperately trying to figure out how he’s going to make it through the next twenty-four hours without snapping at something – anything – Alison says and triggering the nuclear holocaust of a fight that’s obviously been put on hold until they get home tomorrow. But he’s not about to take his frustration out on Claire and he looks up, startled to find that she’s standing a few feet away with a mug of tea in each hand and a plate of jaffa cakes balanced on the top of one of them.

She tilts her head at him and offers up a mug, her face uncharacteristically grave and just a little sad. “You know, don’t you?”

He sighs, taking the mug with one hand and pinching the bridge of his nose with the other – the low-grade headache he’s been fighting since Christmas Eve suddenly flaring back to life. He really doesn’t want to have this conversation right now, especially not with one of his kids. This is exactly why he’s been hiding out in the shed at the bottom of the garden for the last hour – using the excuse of replacing the blades on the ancient Flymo as a way of clearing his head after a really long forty-eight hours of trying to pretend that everything is alright and he hasn’t just been side-swiped by the news that Alison is sleeping with the boys’ PE teacher.

“Know what, love?” Twenty five years of not bringing his job home at night have made hiding things from the kids a reflex, but even as he tries to brush off her concern he sees the little wrinkle of her brow, the skeptical frown that lets him know that his usual deflection tactics aren’t going to work on his oldest any longer.

He occupies himself with his tea for a moment – sweet and hot and perfectly steeped – and watches her as the silence stretches, broken only by the inane chatter of the Radio Five Live football discussion on the old transistor behind him, and his chest tightens a fraction as he sees all the changes that four months of independence and responsibility have wrought. Given the chance to do something useful for her gap year, Claire’s been living in Zambia with a cousin, teaching English and GIS to primary school kids in a village outside of Lusaka. There’s a new confidence to her, a self-assurance in the way she slides her own mug and the plate of biscuits onto the scratched wooden surface of the potting bench and then leans against it, long legs stretched out in front of her, arms crossed in a pose she learned from him as she marshals her thoughts.

The tightness in his chest twists and blooms into a complicated amalgam of pride and pain as he realizes that sometime in the last few months his baby girl has grown up; has gone from lanky, cheeky, lip-pierced adolescence to adulthood; her always sharp intellect now enriched with a new maturity that’s graced her with perception and persistence and a painfully inconvenient emotional intelligence.

“Come on, Dad. You were really quiet in the car yesterday.” She pauses and tilts her head at him, chewing on her lower lip for a moment – another of his nervous ticks that she’s picked up – before going on. “You know about Mum don’t you? About her and Mr. Latham.”

For a brief moment he thinks she’s being awfully brave, there are a whole variety of reasons why he might have been more withdrawn than usual on the hellishly long drive down to Sherborne yesterday – a bad case, a failed conviction, a fight with the CPS over charges, even the drive itself, fraught with frozen slippery roads and a long delay on the B3145 just outside of North Cheriton as they’d waited for the gritter lorries to go through.

Claire hadn’t exactly been talkative herself after four days of sleeping rough on the floor of the Johannesburg airport waiting for flights to Heathrow to finally resume in the wake of the south of England’s worst snow in over sixty years. Compounded by the very particular hell of an economy seat in a packed 11-hour flight that had landed in the early hours of Christmas morning, she’d been almost catatonic when he’d picked her up at Heathrow and driven her home for a couple of hours sleep before they could finally set off for Dorset.

Then it strikes him that _he’s_ only known about Alison and Mr. Latham for the last forty-eight hours, and only because he’d shown up to that Christmas gathering of John and Sherlock’s – at a loose end waiting for Claire’s flight to get in – stupidly exposing himself to Sherlock at his petulant, anti-social worst. And he has to fight another wave of humiliation as he realizes that she is indeed being very, very brave; not just risking outing her mother’s affair if Greg didn’t already know about it, but also as good as admitting that _she’s_ known about it for a while.

He wraps his hands around his mug and occupies himself with tea again while he thinks about his response. There’s a tight knot of pain in his chest at the thought that Claire has known about the affair and hasn’t told him, and he has to breathe deeply a couple of times to get past it. He knows it’s neither fair nor rational to be hurt at what must have been an incredibly difficult secret for an 18-year old to keep from her Dad. Still he needs an answer,

“How long have _you_ known?”

Now she blanches slightly under her sub-tropical summer tan, eyes cast down as she takes a steadying breath before admitting.

“I found out right before I left in August. Mum left her phone in the kitchen, it wasn’t locked and I saw a text I shouldn’t have.” Her shoulders hunch slightly, the confidence evaporating with her misery, and looks up at him, her dark eyes eloquent with remorse and regret.

“I’m sorry, Dad. I should have told you, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. And then I was gone and I couldn’t tell you over the phone.” She’s biting her lip hard now, close to tears and Greg never ceases to be amazed just how deep the ache goes when one of his kids is hurting.

He sets his mug down and reaches across the short space between the potting benches to pull her into his arms. This kind of affection isn’t something she’s permitted very often in the last few years but she’s apparently miserable enough to let him get away with it tonight, snugging her head under his chin and holding on tightly.

He can feel the slight tremors as she tries not to cry, and he leans his head against the soft thickness of her hair.

“Shhh…sweetheart, it’s okay, I’m not angry at you – really – none of this is your fault.”

As he rubs his chin gently over the top of Claire’s head he reflects that he’s not actually sure what he’s been feeling for the last few days. There’s hurt and shame and an overwhelming sadness at the knowledge that he's failed at something really, really important but he’s deflected his occasional flashes of anger onto Sherlock who he’s holding responsible for totally fucking up what would probably be their last Christmas as a family. He’d been too stunned at the party, busy checking the calendar on his phone for suspicious dates, to confront him on the spot, but there will be words when he gets back up to town. But he’s still a little too stunned and mortified by his own obliviousness to have worked up any real anger at Alison yet, although he knows it’s coming.

It’s not that he’s under any illusion that they’ve had a particularly good marriage over the last decade. His job was always going to be hard on any relationship; add in the stress of three kids, a variable-rate mortgage on a house they could barely afford in the first place and Alison’s increasingly demanding work schedule as she moved from teaching chemistry, to department head, to deputy-head of a large London comprehensive and they’d slowly found themselves in that marriage limbo of rushed meals, conflicting calendars and a virtually non-existent sex-life.

Although he has to wonder now if the moratorium on sex wasn’t because she was getting that taken care of elsewhere. And _oh fuck_ that’s a thought that really hurts, because for all their problems, that had always been something that worked for them. Even when the kids had been small and sex was rushed and infrequent, it had been good, and when they were fighting, hell when the fighting was over it was fucking amazing. But slowly they’ve reached a point where the fights have become prolonged over days and weeks with no truce to allow that physical reaffirmation of what had once made them so good together.

It had got bad enough over the autumn that he’d let the contract for the property company that managed the Lewisham flat lapse when the last set of renters had moved out, going so far as to sleep there for a couple of weeks when the fights had iced over into an unbearable silent tension that had left the boys sullen and confused and had culminated in Mark getting excluded from school for three days for fighting.

He rubs Claire’s back soothingly, feeling her settle and then asks, his voice as gentle as he can make it.

“D’you know how long it’s been going on?”

She shakes her head and he feels it against his chest even as she squeezes him a little more tightly.

“No, just that it’s been since the summer.” She sighs, a deep, steadying breath and then shrugs out of his arms, pushing away so that she can look him in the face. “The boys don’t know do they?”

“Fuck, Claire.” He winces. “Sorry…I’m sorry.” He’s usually pretty good at avoiding outright profanity in front of the kids.

Claire just quirks a half-smile at him and interrupts, “It’s fine Dad, I know you say fuck. I say fuck. I say it quite a lot actually.” And then she looks terribly serious once again. “But they don’t know, right?”

“No, I’m pretty sure they don’t. Has Mark said anything? Has anything been said at school?” That’s a whole other nightmare, the thought that Alison’s affair has been public knowledge to everyone but him.

She shakes her head. “No, we Skype a lot and I think he’d have told me if he’d heard that kind of rumour going round about Mum.”

It’s small consolation, but nonetheless Greg feels a little of the tension unwind as he realizes that Alison’s infidelity probably hasn’t been the subject of school, and by extension parental, gossip. At least she’d had the sense to fuck someone that wasn’t on her own staff, reducing the chances of the affair becoming the staff scandal of the year.

With a tired sigh he rubs a hand across the back of his neck and sips his tea, watching as Claire builds up to her next question, the one he’s been expecting ever since they started this conversation, the one to which he dreads giving a truthful answer. She shuffles a little against the bench and then meets his gaze as she finally asks; “You’re going to get a divorce now, aren’t you?”

She looks sadly resigned and just a little disappointed, as if they’ve let her down which, to be honest, they have – her and her brothers – and he’d do anything for her not to look at him like he’s about to turn all of their lives upside down. But he honestly doesn’t see any other way out of this mess and he just nods sadly, watching her bite down hard on her lip to stop it trembling as he sighs very quietly and answers her question.

“I’m sorry, love. Really, I am, but I don’t see any other way out of this. Not now.”

He hasn’t really thought beyond the coming confrontation with Alison, but he can already feel the uncomfortable mixture of pain and relief that comes from knowing that this particular betrayal will give him the determination and the ammunition that he needs to finally walk away with a – relatively – clear conscience.

They’ve been fighting a losing battle for months, neither of them wanting to be the one that makes the final break, neither of them wanting to be the one responsible for the massive disruption that divorce is going to bring to the kids. Claire might be mostly self-sufficient now, but Mark has GCSEs this year and Adam, still waiting for his growth spurt, has spent his first year of secondary school skirting in and out of being bullied by a group of boys that live in one of the blocks of flats on his way to school. Even that had been fuel for their fights, Alison constantly reminding him that he’d been the one to want to take a chance on a house in Kensal Rise back in the 90s when the neighborhood hadn’t been any better than where they were living in Lewisham, just the convenience of a shorter commute and the chance to increase their living space pushing them into making the move to Windermere Avenue after Mark had been born. Financially it’s been a great decision, the entire postcode has gentrified and appreciated in value over the last decade, but there are still rough spots, pockets of deprivation and violence, and every time Adam had come home with a new bruise or missing a part of his uniform, Greg had been castigated about it later.

He rubs his hands across his face and then gives Claire a wry smile as she hands him a couple of jaffa cakes and asks, “Will Mum make it hard for you? To see the boys and stuff, I know you’ve been fighting a lot.”

Greg shrugs and indulges another of his nervous tics, running a hand through his hair as he thinks about the question. To be honest he’s not sure how Alison is going to react to him finally walking away. She’s always been pretty reasonable, if anything the less volatile of the pair of them, but after almost twenty-five years together he knows her well enough to know that guilt will put her on the defensive and if he’s not careful they could easily find themselves in a whole series of ugly battles over the house, the flat, the car, the kids and god alone knows what else.

“I don’t know, love.” It’s not a very satisfying answer, but it’s all he’s got and he takes half a jaffa cake in one bite, savouring the chocolate/lemon-orange tang for a moment before he shrugs again. “We’ll try not to let it get bad. I don’t want you to feel like you have to take sides.”

Claire picks up a jaffa cake for herself and tilts her head at him. “Too late, I already have and Dad, if Mum tries to make things difficult, especially about the boys – I’ll tell them what really happened.” There’s a steely determination in her now, overlaying the still genuine distress that’s evident in the way she’s shredding the sponge on the bottom of the biscuit.

“Oh no, Christ, Claire, don’t go there. Don’t even threaten her with it.” Greg really doesn’t want this to become Claire’s fight, she and Alison have only just got back on reasonable terms after a typically stormy mother-daughter adolescence – one he hadn’t been very helpful with, not really caring when she’d dyed her hair purple and had her lip and her eyebrow pierced – secretly a little chuffed that she’d chosen to emulate his somewhat wild teen years.

“Also too late, I talked to her last night, warned her I wasn’t going to let her mess you about over this.”

Greg winces, well that explains a lot of today’s weirdness; the stony silences and dark looks that had accompanied every meal and Alison’s lack of comment about him sleeping on the floor last night, buying his excuse that the too-soft mattress in her parents’ spare room made his back hurt when normally she would have challenged him and turned it into a fight. “Okay, well don’t push her any further on it. I love that you want to be on my side in this, but lets just see if we can get through it without the boys finding out that she doesn’t really go to Mark’s football matches to watch him play.”

She shrugs and gifts him with a slightly tremulous smile. “Whatever you say, but once I go away again, I want to hear from you every week. I want to know you’re okay. Maybe that blogger guy you’re friends with can teach you to Skype.”

Greg smiles a fraction at the thought of asking John for technical help, but when Claire’s smile fades completely and she says sadly, “I miss you, Dad…lots.” He thinks that maybe he just might have to make the effort to upgrade the laptop he keeps at home and drag himself into the 21st century.

“Okay, I promise.” He’s about to see if he can push his luck and get another hug out of her when the shed door swings open with a bang and Mark – all too-long dark hair and uncoordinated limbs – barges in to announce, “Mum and Gran are all upset with each other over something, so Grandad wants to know if you want to get out the house and go down the Crown with us.”

Greg wonders if his mother-in-law has unearthed the cause of the tension over the last two days and finds himself just a little gratified that she might be taking his side too.

But he’s brought back to the moment by Mark’s use of the plural pronoun and raises a quizzical eyebrow, “Us?”

Mark has only just turned sixteen and while Greg has no problem with him having a beer or two at home, he really doesn’t want to skirt the edge of legality by buying him one in a pub.

“Yeah, Grandad says he’ll buy me a pie so I can have a pint.”

Oh well, that makes it all okay then. Greg doesn’t quite roll his eyes, but it’s close. Fortunately Mark’s at that stage of teenage boyhood where eating a full pie and chips dinner only a couple of hours after his evening meal isn’t going to stretch any publican’s credulity too far.

Greg turns to switch off the radio and then picks up his mug, “Okay, off you go and put a coat on, I’ll be there in a minute.” and gestures Claire out of the shed, following her a little reluctantly as he girds himself for a couple of hours of trying to keep his temper in check as he listens to his father-in-law go on about the glories of the Tory government and how David Cameron is just the man the country needs to get it back on its feet.

_fin_


End file.
